must have been the little trollop’s lover, to call me a coward to her face. If this wasn’t proof, nothing was.
I sat brooding darkly, remembering the straw sticking to the back of her dress after she’d been in the woods with that randy redskin Spotted Tail; Cardigan with his pants round his ankles and her in bare buff when I blundered boozily out of the cupboard where I’d been asleep; the shiny black boots that had betrayed her assignation with that smirking swine Watkins or Watney or what-ever the hell his name was; her preening herself in her sarong before that oily pirate Usman who’d diddled me at cricket … and heaven knew how many others of whom I’d feared the worst. Time and again I’d been torn by jealous unproven suspicion, and resolved to have it out with her … and shirked at the last ’cos I’d rather not know. Well, not this time, bigod; I felt my anger rising as I remembered her protestations that she’d only done the dirty on Cumming to avenge my 'honour'—ha! Like as not her true reason for wreaking vengeance on him was because he’d kicked her out of bed … But if that were so, she’d never have said a word to me about laying a plant on him, would she? Oh, lord, were my foul imaginings getting the better of me yet again; was I judging her by my own murky lights? So many times I’d faced this same hideous question: Elspeth, true or false? It was high time I had an answer, and I was going red in the face and growling as she came tripping back into the room, plump and radiant, no sign at all of her recent distress.
'Jane is bringing fresh tea, and some of those little German biscuits, and oh, you’re not angry with me, dearest, and all is --She stopped short in dismay. 'Why, Harry, whatever is the matter? Why are you scowling so? Oh, my love, what is it?'
I had risen in my jealous wrath. Now I sat down again, marshalling my words, while she viewed me in pretty alarm.
'Elspeth!' says I … and stopped short in turn. 'Ah … what’s that? Bringing tea, is she? Well, now … ah, what about a pot of coffee for the old man, eh? Scowling? No, no, just this leg o' mine giving me a twinge … the old wound, you know … Here, you come and sit on t’other one, and give us a kiss!'
As the black chap said in Shakespeare’s play, ’tis better as it is.
Appendix
It hardly seemed worth while to give footnotes to Flashman' s account of the Tranby Croft affair, since almost all of them would have led the reader to the same authority, W. Teignmouth Shore’s The Baccarat Case: Gordon- Cumming v. Wilson and Others, 1932, in the Notable British Trials Series. It contains a full transcript of the trial, with notes and comments, and is the best and fullest work on the subject. Other books which touch on the case and related matters include Margaret Blunden, The Countess of Warwick, 1967; Piers Compton, Victorian Vortex, 1977; Philippe Julian, Edward and the Edwardians; and an anonymous work, The Private Life of the King, 1901.
Teignmouth Shore published his book 'to win justice for the memory of a man much wronged', and nailed his colours to the mast with his opening quotation from Truth, which asserted after the trial that a dog would not have been hanged on the evidence that convicted Gordon-Cumming. It was an opinion shared by many, and if Flashman is to be believed, they were right.
His view of the verdict aside, Mr Shore makes several points of interest. He describes the outcry against the Prince of Wales as outrageous, and one has to agree that whatever the faults of the future King Edward VII, he hardly deserved the storm which burst over his hapless head from a press which knew a ripe scandal when it saw one, and was only too glad of a royal scapegoat. Mr Shore wondered if any newspaper 'of high standing' in 1932 would have been so censorious. Perhaps not; he did not live to see the 1990s. At the same time, the Prince showed lamentable judgment when the cheating allegation was first brought to his notice, and Mr Shore is plainly right when he suggests that the sensible thing would have been to insist on accused and accusers thrashing the matter out on the spot. There was indeed a remarkable lack of common sense in the way the affair was handled, and in the pathetic belief that it could be kept quiet. Obviously (as Flashman confirms) panic struck not only the Prince and his advisers, but Gordon-Cumming also, or he would never have signed the damning document.
Mr Shore is scathing on the conduct of the trial, 'the Court being turned by consent of the judge into a theatre, and a shoddy theatre at that'.
Whether Flashman’s sensational disclosure finally settles the controversy is for his readers to decide; it fits the known facts, and if it seems unlikely, that is perfectly in keeping with the rest of The Baccarat Case.
An entertaining experiment, which I have made myself, is to insert a cover over the introduction to Mr Shore’s book, and over the last page which carries the verdict, and invite someone who knows nothing of the case to read the trial and pronounce Sir William Gordon-Cumming guilty or not. The reactions are interesting.
Flashman And The Tiger
You think twice about committing murder when you’re over seventy. Mind you, it’s not something I’ve ever undertaken lightly, for all that I must have sent several score of the Queen’s enemies to their last accounts in my time, to say nothing of various bad men and oddsbodies who’ve had the misfortune to cross me when my trigger- finger was jumpy. More than a hundred, easy, I should think—which ain’t a bad tally for a true-blue coward who’d sooner shirk a fight than eat his dinner, and has run from more battle-fields than he can count. I’ve been lucky, I suppose—and devilish quick.
But those were killings in the way of business, as a soldier, or in my many misadventures in the world’s wild places, where it was me or t’other fellow, Murder’s different, you see; it takes more courage than I’ve ever had, to think it out, and weigh the consequences, and keep your hand steady as you thumb back the hammer and draw a bead on the unsuspecting back. You need to be in a perfect fever of fear and rage, as I was when I threw de Gautet over the cliff in Germany in ’48, or when I sicked on that poor lunatic steward to shoot John Charity Spring, M.A., on the slave-ship off the Cuba coast. That’s always been more my style, to get some idiot to do the dirty work for me. But there comes a time when there’s no scapegoat handy, and you have to do the business yourself—and that’s when you sweat at the thought of the black cap and the noose at the end of the eight-o’clock walk. It makes my teeth chatter on the glass just to write about it—aye, and suppose you bungle it, and your victim turns on you, full of spite and indignation? That can easily happen, you know, when you’re an old man with a shaky wrist and a cloudy eye, too stiff in the joints even to cut and run. What business have you got at your time of life to be trying to slaughter a man fifteen years younger than you are, in the middle of civilised London, especially when he’s a high- tailed gun-slick with a beltful of scalps who can shoot your ears off with his eyes shut? For that’s what Tiger Jack Moran was, and no mistake.
So you understand why I say it takes a deal of thought before you determine to go after a man like that with fatal intent, knowing that your speed and cunning have been undermined by a lifetime of booze and evil living and your white hair’s coming out in handfuls. Dammit, I wouldn’t have tackled him in my prime, when I had size and strength and viciousness to set in the balance against my yellow belly. But there I was, a hoary old grandfather, full of years and dignity and undeserved military honours, with my knighthood and V.C., as respectable an old buffer as
